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Wednesday, October 05, 2016

`Totter's Rights'

Thanks
to Ron Slate I borrowed a copy of On the
Burning of Books (Unicorn Press, 2016) by Kenneth Baker. Unlike most
coffee-table volumes, it comes with a text worth reading, which is fortunate
because Baker understands book-burning in the broadest, most interesting sense.
The Nazis, communists and the Ayatollah Khomeini receive due attention, but so
do Dr. Johnson, Dickens and Philip Larkin. The section on Thomas Hardy, who
burned many of his diaries, letters and manuscripts, includes the only known
photograph of Hardy smiling. Baker is never preachy, unlike others who document
book burning, and he lets the damning evidence speak for itself. Ron rightly
describes On the Burning of Books as “even
tempered and sanguine” even though it “deals throughout with intolerance,
fanaticism, disgust, fear and ruination.”

The
book is dense with little wonders. Near the end, Baker includes a brief note
from one of its designers, Julia Brown, titled “Totter’s Rights.” Baker defines
totter as “something that has been
discarded as rubbish, i.e. on a skip, can be legally taken by someone who has
found it. `Tot’ may originate from the German for `dead.’” I knew totter only as a verb meaning, as the OED has it, “to walk or move with
unsteady steps; to go shakily or feebly; to toddle; also, to walk with
difficulty; to reel, stagger.” It has many meanings, though few seem to have
successfully crossed the Atlantic. It can refer to a playground swing and to
the act of swinging, which I suppose is related to another piece of playground
equipment, the teeter-totter or see-saw.

Brown
tells the story of the Scottish architect Darcy Braddell (1884-1970), whose
wife threw out a shoebox of his letters several years after his death. “The
shoebox, unknown to any of the family, was put in the dustbin by my grandmother
in a typically methodical and careful clear out before her death about a year
later.” The letters turned up in the catalogue of an antiquarian book dealer in
Kensington, carrying “a fairly substantial price tag.” Brown was sent by the family
to investigate. She explains:

“Apparently
as dustmen have `Totter’s Rights’ so one had legitimately sold an old shoe box
of letters to the book dealer. We paid up (apparently we were in competition
with the Huntington Library) respecting my grandmother’s wishes, and the
letters are now back, undisturbed, in the family archive. The moral of this
(pre-shredding) story is that if you want to destroy paper you really must burn
it!’

That
brings us to the pertinent definition of totter
in the OED -- “a rag-and-bone
collector”—which recalls Yeats’ lines: “I must lie down where all the ladders
start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” The dictionary gives only
two citations, from 1891 and 1910, and both are from periodicals. There’s no
mention of a possible German etymology, but the OED speculates that the word may derive from tot, meaning “a dust-heap picker's name for a bone; whence by
extension, anything worth picking from a refuse-heap or elsewhere.” (Go here to
see more on this theme.)

Some
writers are totters. We collect shiny bits, sort them into boxes and wait to
find an appropriate use.